According to President Obama, smoking pot isn’t a more perilous prospect, health-wise, than drinking alcohol. Of course, Obama, in an interview with The New Yorker, couched this statement by issuing a series of responsible-sounding disclaimers.

In an age of unprecedented antagonism toward the press, one newspaper headquartered in the heart of a former empire is making a spirited thrashing of the image and ambitions of some of the world’s proudest elites.

Over the last decade, New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell has managed to metamorphose from a trained shill for Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and the deregulatory movement into an intellectual darling of mainstream “liberal” America. How did he do it?

Scientists are telling us we can engineer our way out of the climate crisis, and with the intellectual property behind most of the solutions sitting in the public domain, any person or country with a few billion dollars could do it.

Last week, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency expressed “serious concerns” over Iran’s nuclear program in a strongly worded report that claimed that there is evidence that Iran might be developing an atomic weapon. This is the stuff of “fantasyland,” according to The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh.

We’re ever so happy and humbled to announce that Truthdig has once again been picked as one of the five finalists for the Webby Award in the “Blog - Political” category! This year, the competition is formidable, with some serious heavy hitters ...

You may have already seen this, but it bears re-posting far and wide: The inimitable Seymour Hersh gave truly disturbing details, during the Campus Progress journalism conference in July, expounding upon his article from that month’s New Yorker about the Bush administration’s attempts to find a cause for war against Iran in late 2007.

We all know about this week’s Controversial Satire Attempt by that wicked, bad New Yorker magazine, which critics can now bash for being wicked instead of just elitist. (Boring!) That particular faux pas rocked the ever-intertwined worlds of politics and publishing and seemed to prove that poking fun at a certain presumptive presidential nominee can be a precarious enterprise, if not an absolute no-no.

An expression of outrage is the highest compliment that politicians can bestow upon a satirist. So when spokesmen for Barack Obama and John McCain echo each other and many another stuffed shirt in complaining about the current cover of The New Yorker, the magazine’s editors and cartoonist Barry Blitt should accept such remarks in precisely that spirit.

The latest New Yorker cover features a satirical cartoon of a Muslim Barack Obama fist-pumping his terrorist wife in front of a portrait of Osama bin Laden and a burning flag. The image was intended “to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd,” says the magazine. When 10 percent or more of Americans still think Obama is a Muslim, there’s apparently no room for humor—tasteless, offensive or otherwise.

The New Yorker’s ever-tenacious Seymour Hersh is once again on the case of the Bush administration’s Mideast agenda, giving President Bush’s “Mission Evolving” speech from last month a more concrete evolutionary end point: Iran.

This week’s highly anticipated Iraq progress report will no doubt be highly predictable, says The New Yorker’s George Packer, who’s more concerned about the longer view than America’s current leadership, whom he considers to be “trapped in the eternal present” in ways that can only spell trouble for Iraqis.

How do you spot an atheist? According to Stephen Colbert, one sure-fire sign of the godless naysayer comes in the telling form of a New Yorker subscription. “The Colbert Report’s” pseudo-pundit has some strong advice for how New Atheists might run their own anti-religion.

Contrary to the official “diplomatic solution” line, Seymour Hersh reports that Washington is stepping up plans for a possible airstrike on Iran. According to Reuters, Hersh’s story in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker reports that a former senior defense official said the planning was, in Hersh’s words, “based on the belief that a bombing campaign against Iran would humiliate the leadership and lead the Iranian public to overthrow it.” The ex-official reportedly added that he was shocked to hear the strategy.